Doctor’s Note: Today’s letter deals with explicit descriptions of rape and sexual assault. Please read at your own discretion.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I was raped, and that’s pretty much the only real sexual experience I’ve ever had in my entire life. I’ve had a first kiss, I’ve been on dates where things have gone past kissing, but nothing a real adult would regard as anything worth calling a “sex life”. Push comes to shove, the only person who’s ever wanted to suck my dick is someone I didn’t want sucking my dick, and the only things that have ever been in my ass were explicitly refused and put in there anyway.

I’m not going to downplay the existential horror of it all: the feeling that, on top of being lonely, the only person who has ever truly wanted me was a sexual predator. I go years of my life finally thinking that at long last I’m going to have a positive sexual experience and have my fantasies fulfilled, only to be traumatized by one of the worst things to ever possibly happen to someone.

The aftermath has many facets as you can imagine: legal, familial, professional, but the one I seek help from you for is how to get a sex life after being raped. How exactly do you “reclaim your sexuality” when nobody wants you? It’s not just that I feel unwanted, it’s that every time I try to find someone it only seems to confirm that I am unwanted.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to solve the problem or worked on myself. I am a well-dressed, professional man; certainly someone who’s ambitious and successful in life, and at least not ugly. I’ve lost weight, maintain a respectable style of facial hair, and carry myself professionally.

I’ve tried attending clubs and sports programs in my area, but the demographics are utterly abysmal. It is invariably people well outside my age range (i.e. like actual senior citizens, not “ew women expire at 30” nonsense) and people already coupled, to say nothing of the fact that Covid in general completely destroyed many clubs and programs and decimated the ranks of those that remained. My area in general just doesn’t have that many people my age: I get outside and “touch grass” quite frequently, only to be met by a parade of older people and families with little kids.

Further complicating things is that, as a kinky person who has tried and failed to date vanilla, I realize that my options are very slim, especially as a “submissive man”. Kink events in my area exist and I’ve attended them, but the “alternative lifestyle” of the BDSM community basically just seems to be the same old gender roles in leather clothes and latex boots. Most men are doms, most women are subs, and the smattering of female switches and dommes are variously already-partnered, looking for a transactional arrangement, are straight-up scammers or bot accounts, not heterosexual, or otherwise incompatible.

In the “real world” I have almost no social life outside of my coworkers, who are undatable for obvious reasons of professional ethics and workplace drama. Work itself is a hinderance to my social life outside of my job: the hours are long and extremely unpredictable, and the amount of work I have to do on a given day can vary by a whole order of magnitude.

I maintain online dating profiles to predictably get zero compatible matches or comments, or just bots and scammers.

I’ve went to a speed dating event, only to get unanimously rejected.

Turning to sex workers is completely out of the question. I have my own personal values and ethical beliefs that make such a proposition dubious even if we were in an environment of complete legality. As a rape victim you can certainly say I value consent, and sex work can be very exploitative. Even still, I want someone to spend their time with me. I don’t want to spend money on someone. I want to be attractive and enjoyable to the point where someone willingly stays with me for free. I want to be someone’s partner, not their “client”. And of course, we certainly don’t live in an environment of complete legality. As troubled as I am right now, life is too good for me to risk it all on the legal technicalities of escort services or pro dommes.

I just don’t know what to do, and it’s so frustrating. It seems like other people get to have good and bad experiences in their sex lives, ups and downs, toxic partners mixed in with wonderful ones. They get to have the good touch as well as the bad touch. For me, I am well on my way to 30 and my sex life is essentially just masturbating and getting raped. It’s like someone saying their business career was fantasizing about starting a business before having their investment capital stolen. It’s not exactly a career, is it?

I really wish I had someone other than my rapist for a sex partner, but I just don’t know how that can happen. Reclaiming your sexuality is supposed to be an important part of getting your power back, but I feel so disempowered because, let’s just be honest, sex is something you need other people to do. You can’t feel sexually wanted if nobody wants to have sex with you.

I read about how “hypersexuality” is a response some rape victims have and can’t help but feel a bit of jealousy: even as an unhealthy coping mechanism, it’s just a bizarre alternate world to me. A large part of why I got raped was because I got desperate to find someone and ended up in a far more dangerous situation than I anticipated, yet rape victims other than me have coped by having too much sex. Here I am starving of sexual desirability, while other people are able to cope with binge-eating. I’m dying of thirst in the desert and read stories about how people get addicted to freshwater swimming and over-hydration.

I don’t want to sound cynical and harsh as an attitude, just as a statement of the problem. We don’t need to invoke incel rhetoric about women being the “gatekeepers of sex” here to admit basic facts and observations. Sex is a social activity that, once you are willing to do, other people become the limiting factor. You do not determine whether you have a sex life. Other people do. You need someone to do it with you. You need consent and cooperation with someone else. It is, by definition, not a solo activity. There’s something to be said about “exploring what you like”, but you can’t do that when what you’d like involves someone else, and “solo sex” is honestly a euphemism in my opinion.

Masturbating is “solo sex” the way that a pitching machine is “solo baseball”, or kicking field goals all afternoon is “solo American football”. You are at best practicing a relevant skill or body mechanic. You are, at best, training. You are not actually playing what is by definition a team sport.

Even that aside, I’m just not sure there’s that much to explore left on my own. I have masturbated thousands of times in my life and haven’t had a truly original fantasy or bodily sensation in ages. I’ve tried anal masturbation, but the legendary “male g-spot” can just never be found, and having a finger up my butt just doesn’t seem to be it for me. At a certain point I feel like I’ve reached the hard limit of what I can do or figure out by myself, and at the end of the day, you can only swing your bat at the machine so many times before it just begins to weight on you that you might never actually get to play baseball for real. That loneliness is before we take into account the physical and mental sexual difficulties that have come post-rape.

I’ve been through a lot, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Raped and Redshirted

DEAR RAPED AND REDSHIRTED: I am so, so sorry this happened to you. That’s a horrible thing to have gone through and I know it’s left its marks on you. I hope you have friends and family – by blood or by choice – who’ve been supporting you, caring for you and helping you heal.

But I want to tell you from the start: I’m not going to answer most of your letter. It feels a little crass to say it under the circumstances – like I’m being glib in the face of what was done to you – but I honestly feel that you’re asking the wrong question here. I think this is very much a case of the question you’re asking is not the question you need answered, and I think I would be doing you a massive disservice if I didn’t address the issue that is lingering over this like a ghost.

I want to push back against something you’ve said more than a few times in this letter – something that I think is central to the question that you’re asking and to the struggles you’re experiencing. You keep talking about your rape as though it were sex what happened to you was not a sexual experience. It was violence. It was violence using sexual acts as the instrument of inflicting violence upon you, but it was an act of violence.

Rape is not a crime of sex. Rape isn’t about sexual desire or arousal. People don’t rape because they’re turned on and can’t control themselves, they don’t rape because the other person is just so alluring and they don’t rape because that’s how they express themselves sexually. People commit rape as a method of forcing control onto others. The act of a rapist isn’t to have sex, the act of a rapist is to dominate another person, to force the other person to accede to the rapist’s will. Sex is the method and one that’s used because it’s a form of domination. It’s the act of overriding someone else’s autonomy – bodily and otherwise – because the rapist chose to do so.

I think seeing your rape through the lens of sex is part of what’s causing you so many problems and why you’re having a hard time. Your rapist didn’t choose you out of romantic or sexual desire. It absolutely was not and is not the case that you are so uniquely undesirable or unattractive that the only person who could ever want you was a rapist. Whether you realize it or not, this mindset is subtly implying that you’re somehow at fault for being raped. The way you seem to be framing things, whether consciously or subconsciously, is that there’s something inherently wrong about you, something that makes you repellant and the only person who could possibly find you attractive or desirable was a rapist.

This is 100% bulls--t. What happened was not your fault. They were a predator. They preyed upon you. This what rapists do: they look for people to prey upon, to isolate, to exploit and to assault. You are not to blame for what was done to you – and I want to make it perfectly clear that this was a thing that was done to you. You were raped. This wasn’t desire. This was a violent crime.

I know that the aftermath of sexual assault and rape can be a real mindf--k. Male victims often have a very hard time in the aftermath because so many toxic ideas about “what it means to be a man” will throw the victims into the woodchipper. It “means” that you’re weak and deserved to be violated, it “means” that you “let” someone else have power over you or it “means” that you “secretly kinda wanted it”. And the goddamn mindf--k of how it hits afterwards is the sort of thing that leads people to believe that they were somehow complicit in their own assault – either by “allowing” themselves to be a victim or simply not being “strong” enough (that is: man enough) to stop it.

The violence of the rape often continues after the act because the victim of the assault may turn things inward. It becomes a cycle of self-blame, self-recrimination, the attempts to make sense of a senseless act that lands at “I must have been at fault somehow”.

You were not. This was not your fault. Tattoo that backwards onto your forehead so that you can see it first thing in the morning. Shave your head if you need the room. This was not your fault. This was not because you are so unlovable and undesirable that only a monster would want you. THIS WAS NOT YOUR FAULT. 

You talk about the fallout after the assault, but what you don’t mention is whether you actually sought out counseling afterwards, what kind of counseling you found and whether it helped at all. Though if I’m being perfectly honest, I think that whatever you’ve done so far hasn’t helped. Not if you’re still putting so much of this on yourself in this way. 

It sounds to me, a loudmouth with an advice column – and to be clear, Dr. NerdLove is not any sort of actual doctor – that you’re still looking to make sense of things. Whether it’s trying to find evidence that you’re past it, something that will convince you that you’re not the person who was raped any more, something that proves you didn’t “deserve” it or that there was some greater meaning or silver lining to this, and you’ve focused on sex and relationships as the ‘proof’.

This feels to me like you’re trying to find a sense of control again, especially after your bodily autonomy was violated the way that it was. That’s a very common feeling after a violent crime like this. And I think to a certain extent, you’re making things worse for yourself by treating your rape as though it was about sex – especially since it sounds like you’re still blaming yourself for it. I mean this line right here is very telling, to me:

“A large part of why I got raped was because I got desperate to find someone and ended up in a far more dangerous situation than I anticipated”

That right there? That’s self-blame and that’s bulls--t. People get desperate to find someone all the time and often make poor choices because of it. Those poor choices don’t inevitably lead to assault, nor do those choices mean that they’re not victims of the people who hurt them. It certainly doesn’t mean they deserve to be raped, abused or harmed in other ways. It means that someone found them in a vulnerable state and took advantage of it. Neither the desire nor  desperation are the problem here, nor are they the cause. The only people who are ultimately responsible are people who look for the vulnerable, the lost and the lonely. This is what happened to you: someone took advantage of your vulnerability.  That doesn’t make you responsible for what happened to you. Being vulnerable isn’t something that you’re supposed to avoid. Being vulnerable doesn’t mean that you’re at fault because someone else took advantage of your vulnerability. You’re not expected – nor should you be – to be on your guard at all times, to treat everyone you encounter as a potential threat until proven otherwise. That’s not safety and security, that’s not being smart or being a “real man”, that’s just hypervigilance – you know, one of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s not something you’re supposed to f--king strive for, that’s a state that people try to recover from. 

This was not your fault. You are not to blame. I’m going to keep saying this until it makes your eyes bleed and you feel the words – actual words manifesting in physical space – come out your ears because you have been so filled by this knowledge. YOU ARE NOT TO BLAME. You wound up in a place with someone who deceived you, tricked you and ultimately violated your trust and your body. Someone used your vulnerability against you as a way to hurt you. That sin is entirely and exclusively theirs. 

And look, I am saying this with all the empathy and compassion I can muster and I hope you feel that when I say that I think the way you’re trying to address that is incredibly unhealthy for you. I think, at best, focusing on trying to get laid is going to continue being an exercise in frustration and self-loathing until you address this.

At worst, I think it’s going to become a form of self-harm.

Part of that “hypersexuality” you’re talking about? You’re right, that’s a profoundly unhealthy coping mechanism… but the reason for it isn’t to “get over the rape” or “reclaim their sexuality”, it’s often about one of two things: self-harm and punishment, or regaining a feeling of autonomy and agency again. The latter is often very much about proving something to themselves – that they’re not letting the rapist “win”, that their rapist doesn’t have “control” over them or gets to influence what they do, that they’re in charge of who they f--k or that what happened to them will be less bad if they just drown it in other people’s bodies until it doesn’t feel the way it does.

That’s not “you’re dying of thirst and they’re dying of water-poisoning from being having too much water”, that’s someone else trying to deal with the pain in the aftermath of a horrible event. It’s also important to note that hypersexuality doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly super sexually desirable. It means they’re going out and having a lot of sex, with a lot of people, and not necessarily being discerning about who or why. I rather suspect that if you were to ask them, many would tell you that the sex they’re having isn’t actually good or pleasurable because the point isn’t good sex, it’s taking power back. Even if that’s not what’s consciously going through their head in the moment.

Do I think reclaiming your sexuality is important? Absolutely, and I think it can be incredibly healing and life-affirming. It is a reminder that you’re stronger and more resilient than many believe – sometimes even than you, yourself believe. But I honestly don’t think that you’re doing is reclaiming your sexuality. I think you’re trying to prove something – to yourself, to people who didn’t and don’t believe you, to the universe. I think you’re hoping that if you can just prove that you’re desirable and can be “more” than someone who was raped then even if it doesn’t make the rape un-happen, it would at least be the act that finally gets you over it. And I don’t think that it’s ever going to work. Certainly not in a healthy way or a way that would help heal you.

I talk about “being in good working order” in order to date pretty damn often I know, and I have to be honest: I don’t think you’re there at all. I think you’re in a mindset that is going to make it incredibly difficult to not just find sex – especially sex worth having, but to actually accept desire or affection from someone or for that sex to have any sort of impact or meaning. I think if you were to go find someone and have sex, afterwards you’re going to feel empty and unsettled, a sense that things aren’t “right” in some nebulous way that you can’t quite put your finger on. I think that will just lead to more unhealthy attempts at coping and healing that will only make things worse before they get better.

And yes, I think you need to talk to a professional, not to a loudmouth asshole like me. If you don’t have a therapist who is experienced in dealing with sexual trauma then I think you really need to find one. At the very least, I think the best thing you can do is to call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or chat with one of their counselors via their website. You might also want to visit 1in6, which is specifically for men who’ve experienced rape and sexual assault. They offer free, confidential online support for men just like you, who’ve been raped and assaulted, lead online support groups and can help you find the resources that are available to you to help encourage your healing.

I know that this isn’t the answer you want. I know how frustrating, even emasculating all this is, and I absolutely empathize with you. But I don’t think that trying to get laid is going to help, only hurt, and you hurt enough as it is. I think you need to focus on your healing, more than anything else.  

You’re carrying a lot of pain right now and it sounds to me like no small amount of self-blame. It’s time to finally put it down. There’s been enough pain. It’s time to clean the wound and let the healing begin.

Love and sex will be waiting when you’re ready. But for now, I think you need to take care of yourself and these deeper, far more pressing needs.

You’ll be ok. I promise.

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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: So straight up, I (m/21) am 5’4, 5’5 on a good day. I’m also a virgin who’s never held hands with a girl, never mind gone on a date or had a girlfriend. The two are unquestionably connected – I’ve watched girls walk right past me to go flirt with the 6’ tall dudes instead, even though I’m exactly their type in every other way. And don’t get me started on dating apps, I may as well be invisible on there and even then I see “if you’re under 6’ swipe left” all the damn time.

I know all the tricks for looking taller, I don’t like boots and I refuse to use lifts. I just want to know why nobody wants to admit that if you’re not taller than 5’10, you may as well give up trying to date. 

Short King In Yellow

DEAR SHORT KING IN YELLOW: You say that you know all the tricks for looking taller, so I won’t go into those. Instead, let’s start with something obvious: If you had to be 6’ tall to date, the human race would have gone extinct generations ago. People who are 6’ or taller make up less than 10% of the population. There are more people who complain about being under 6’ than people who reach that height.

Here’s something slightly less obvious: John Boyega, Kit Harrington, Ed Sheeran and Zac Effron are 5’8” tall. Tom Cruise and Robert Downey Jr. are 5’7”. Daniel Radcliffe and Bruno Mars are 5’5”. Chris Hart is 5’2”. There’re very few people who’re going to kick them out of bed after their shoes come off.

Now, I know what you’re about to say, because I am psychic and also because I’ve been having this argument for a long, long time: yes, they’re celebrities. They’re singers and actors and comedians. What this tells you is that height clearly isn’t everything. Height is a sexy quality for some, but it’s not the only sexy quality, nor is it a requirement. Attraction is a multi-axis graph, with many, many different qualities that go into making someone desirable.

If you feel that your height is a detriment to your dating success, then the obvious answer is: OK, so what else are you bringing to the table? What else do you have going for you that makes you attractive? And if the answer is “nothing”, then what are you willing to do to cultivate those traits? Because no, you don’t need to be the top 1% to date in other areas if you’re under a certain height (yes, I’ve seen those studies; those are why we have concepts like p-hacking and phrases like ‘correlation isn’t causation’), you just need to have things that make you someone that people want to spend time with and whose company people enjoy. The most attractive, romantically and sexually successful people I know – of a wide variety of heights – are people who are just fun to be with. The fact that people enjoy spending time with them is a big part of what makes them attractive.

You know what isn’t attractive? People getting into a snit about their height or who throw a tantrum when their girlfriends wear heels. Short Man Syndrome is actually the bigger turn-off than whether or not someone is above average height in their stocking feet.

(That’s 5’7.5” for men, globally, by the way).

Yes, there are people who feel strongly about wanting a partner who is taller than them. There are also people who feel strongly about a partner who makes more (or less) than they do or who isn’t as smart as them, who is as conventionally attractive as them if not moreso, or who is less successful than they are. People have preferences that exclude wide swaths of the human population, and that’s entirely their business.

Sometimes those preferences will include you. And those are the ones you notice. The only reason why you pay so much attention to those ‘swipe left’ bits in people’s dating profiles is because it feels personal to you. If you were a blue-eyed brunette and their profiles said “brown eyes need not apply” or “No gingers”, you would likely either snort derisively or miss it entirely, simply because it’s not your ox being gored.

But here’s an important question: if someone were to say that you were their ideal match except for this one thing – a thing that you have literally no control over – and they were willing to throw the amazing future you two would have aside over that thing… would you actually want to date this person? Would you cry bitter tears over this loss, or would you wonder why the hell you would ever want to be tied up with someone who’s that shallow? If you would still want to be with that person and still be upset that they’re that superficial… well, quite frankly, I would have to question your priorities.

And I say this as someone who is also under 5’10”: my height has never been a problem with getting dates. Yes, there’re people who likely have been uninterested in me because I’m not a particular height; I couldn’t give less of a shit. That’s a them problem, not a me problem. I’m sure there were probably some who were hotter than hot, but the great thing about this world is that there’re hundreds of thousands of women who are just as amazing, if not moreso, who didn’t care about my height. I could spend my time mourning all the missed opportunities – and thus have no time to do literally anything else – or I could disregard the people who simply aren’t worth my time and move on. And those people have demonstrated that they’re not worth my time.

Now I will say that I empathize with your frustration. It hurts when you feel like people won’t give you a chance based on an arbitrary aspect of you, something that you have next to no control over. It’s entirely reasonable to wish that people would give you a chance, even if you’re not their ideal height. But I think it’s also important to look at yourself and consider who you are willing to give a chance to, even if they’re not your ideal. What things are you willing to overlook in someone you might want to date? I’ve found that a lot of the folks who get into high dudgeon over being excluded aren’t exactly taking on any and all comers either; they have their own must-haves and deal-breakers, just as the women who passed on them did.

I’m sure you and others would be upset at the idea of “having” to date someone you didn’t find attractive. Ok… but that applies to other people too. People are allowed to have their preferences, even if those preferences don’t include you.

But – to forestall the inevitable and obvious rejoinder – I can all but guarantee you that your lack of romantic success has far less to do with your height and far more about your attitude. If I can feel the attitude dripping off your email, women who meet you in person absolutely sense it radiating off you like a passive-aggressive uranium enrichment plant. So my suggestion would be to start getting over it and start embracing the idea of being a short king instead.

And one more thing: I’ve long been saying that dating apps should be a supplement to meeting people, but this is especially true if, for example, you’re shorter than average. One of the drawbacks to the apps is that we have fewer opportunities for serendipity. It’s very easy to get caught up in what we think we want and miss out on people who we might vibe with if we’d met in person. I know people who still get on like a house on fire decades after they first met… but they would never have matched if they encountered each other on an app.

So as you embrace being a short king and cultivating your other attractive attributes, I’d suggest focusing your attention on meeting people in person, rather than relying on the apps. Keep an open mind and give people a chance; you’ll find that you click with people you might not have given a second glance on Hinge.

Good luck.

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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I have read a lot of your responses to letters over the years. I think you share an optimistic encouraging world view which is not especially common for men on the internet these days so I appreciate your responses.

My question has to do with the shame of being an older virgin. I know you have answered this topic a million times and I agree with your response that it’s not and shouldn’t be treated as shameful.

My problem is a I am letting social media and specifically Reddit inform my world view around this. I can’t help but read all the threads on Reddit asking “when does virginity become weird/ a red flag?” “Would you date a virgin” “Should I tell my date I’m a virgin?”.

In a lot of these threads I feel like my worst fears are confirmed. There are a lot of people on reddit saying they wouldn’t date a virgin, that it’s a red flag etc And a lot the advice men give to each other on there is just “don’t bring it up” or even lie about it.

It’s hard to go into dating with a confident mindset after reading people reinforcing my insecurities over and over again. I know the simple solution is just don’t read it, but how can I get over my fear that since it is so prevalent on social media that it represents how most people actually feel?

Last American Virgin

DEAR LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN: This is a classic case of “Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this,” “Well, stop doing that”. Going on social media and looking for opinions about something you’re already anxious about is a very good way to kick your confirmation bias into gear and only notice the answers or replies that serve to reaffirm that your being a virgin of A Certain Age (where that age is always “However old you are” and the age you should have lost your virginity is “your age – (5 to 10) years”).

And I do stress “notice” in that because there’re frequently people who will say that virginity isn’t that big of a deal to them or talk about how they’ve dated or slept with virgins or how they themselves were older virgins and the positive experiences they had. But those don’t register nearly as easily because… well, because they run counter to what you expect to see. That’s how confirmation bias works; you give greater credence to what you already believe, no matter how much it hurts you, and dismiss what goes against those beliefs. The logic involved doesn’t actually matter. The claims in favor of your belief can be so tenuous as to be fictional but they will still resonate within your soul like the ringing of the cathedral bells from the Undertaker’s entrance music. The posts against those beliefs can be filled with details and proven with charts and graphs but there will always be some reason why that doesn’t apply to you or was such a black swan event that you should just dismiss it entirely.

This isn’t unique to you; this is something that’s deeply embedded in the psyche of everybody. But this is also why if you’re going to find proof of what you already believe, you may as well choose to believe in things that help you instead of hurting you.

But that’s a Future You problem. Right now, Present You is trying to wash all those posts and anxieties out of your brain and it seems like all the logical scouring powder in the world is no proof against these emotional stains. What is there left for you?

Well, I hope you’ll forgive me for a moment because we’re going to take what seems like a random tangent. Stick with me, I promise I will drag this back to the point, kicking and screaming, and you’ll understand where I’m going with all of this.

So anyone with eyes, a brain and a functioning Internet connection can’t help but notice how s--tty Google has become. The first page, even the second and third pages are often full of misleading advertisements and paid placement rather than the results you’re looking for, and a high number of content aggregator sites full of SEO bait make up the remainder… none of which actually provide the information you were actually searching for. In fact, it’s become so bad that it’s become something of a cliché to add “reddit” or “site: reddit” at the end of any search string; the idea being that searching Reddit, specifically, will actually get you real answers written by real people.

And to be sure: this is extremely helpful, especially if, say, you’re looking for technical advice or help with a particular problem, recurring bug or other issue.

But the thing about Reddit is that it’s full of various communities, and those communities are full of people. And those communities and those people tend to have agendas, accepted wisdom and group-think. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, mind you; it’s just the nature of communities. Communities tend to be made of like-minded individuals, so it’s not surprising that they’re going to have very similar views on particular topics – especially topics that are central to that community. The folks who radically disagree or whose views are 180 degrees tend not to stick around in single-topic communities.

(This is less true in, say, communities and forums where there’s a wider diversity of topics, like a friend’s Discord server or a subreddit for a more general subject; in those cases, disagreements still crop up but there’re other areas of agreement or accord. You can think that Baldur’s Gate 3 was a stunning achievement while your buddy can think that it was just Dragon Age But Even Hornier and while you may argue vehemently about it, you both agree that Fall Guy was one of the best movies of the year…)

The problem, however, is that when you’re part of that community and that forms the place where you have the majority of your discussions on said topic, is that it’s very easy to forget that your community isn’t the world.

In that way, it’s very similar to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads or Mastodon; if you see the same things being said over and over again, it becomes very easy to assume that this is just the way most people think or feel. Again: this is just a quirk of human psychology; literally everyone is vulnerable to this because it’s just part of how we’re wired. Hear things or see things over and over again enough times and you start to assume that it must be true.

Now this can cause problems for people who are not part of that particular community – especially if that community tends to take very stringent stances that become The Way Things Are. To give an example: I – as a white man in his mid-to-late 40s – recently have given in to the inevitable and got into vinyl records. I wanted to get some suggestions on what turntables might fit my needs and budget. So I turned to Reddit for suggestions, including looking for some reviews on a couple likely contenders.

I was immediately hit with wave after wave of threads about how anyone who used X turntable was an idiot and anyone who used Y turntable should have their ears gouged out and if you didn’t use Z turn table with XZ speakers in a specific setup with A1 wires, D2 needle cartridge and whatever else, you may as well hand your eardrums over to someone who would use them properly.

And of course, this entire setup would cost in the thousands of dollars, but this was reasonable if you were going to listen to vinyl “the way it was meant to be listened to”.

All of which is well and good, but I was coming to this not as a budding audiophile but someone who decided it might be fun to listen to some of my old favorite albums the way I did back in the 80s. I didn’t need the top of the line, perfect audio setup, and I was more than willing to forgo a nigh-inaudible difference in sound quality for the convenience of listening via wireless headsets on occasion. But trying to find recommendations for someone with my particular use case – one I suspect is more common than the hardcore fans would believe – was like trying to find a needle in a very angry, surprisingly snobbish stack of different needles.

That isn’t to say that those recommendations weren’t good, nor that they didn’t have their place. They just didn’t consider that people had use cases that didn’t include their particular priors, because the overall accepted wisdom of those communities were “Audiophile Today, Audiophile Tomorrow, Audiophile Forever”. So while their advice would be helpful for people who were just like them, it’s far less useful for someone who wasn’t.

Which is why – bringing things back around – it’s important to remember that while Reddit can be incredibly useful in some areas, it can be less helpful in others. You want to keep in mind that just because a particular community – even a large one – seems to say one thing, that doesn’t mean that this is true for everyone or even most people.

It’s especially not a good measure of overall public sentiment, especially since Reddit’s hardly a good reflection of the population at large, demographically, politically or in any other way that would be statistically significant. Much like Twitter, most people in the US, never mind the world, aren’t actually on Reddit and few pay any attention to it at all. It’s given outsize importance by people who – like me – are Terminally Online.

(Let’s put it this way: take your favorite Reddit, YouTube or TikTok scandal or beef and try to explain it to someone who isn’t as online as you are. See how long it takes before you realize you have to explain weeks to months’ worth of backstory before you can even make the scandal make sense as a scandal.)

Nor, for that matter, is it helped that Reddit, like most social media, is incentivized towards negativity. It’s much easier to be cynical, negative and dismissive than it is to be encouraging and positive, in part because we’re taught to think that cynicism and negativity sound smart and cultured, while positivity and optimism sounds naïve and foolish. You can see this in any number of threads about, say, people having issues with opening up their relationship or struggling with a conflict with their partner.

This isn’t helped by the fact that people can and frequently do respond less based on the facts at hand and more on their own issues. Nobody is such a dispassionate observer of reality that they don’t bring their own biases, prejudices and preconceived notions to any topic, but many times you’ll run into folks who will be responding to the post in their head rather than what’s on the page. One incident that stood out to me was watching someone in a poly community forum ask for advice after her husband had been dumped by one of his partners and she wasn’t sure how best to support him. The vast majority of replies weren’t about how to help but complaining about married people and how wives were the worst… something of an odd response considering this was someone asking how to help and support her husband during a low period, rather than complaining about something he did.

The meme of “I like pancakes/ So you’re saying you hate waffles” very much applies here.

People will tend to leap to negative conclusions based on very little evidence – sometimes even taking what other commentors said as something that the original poster said. And those comments tend to be the ones that get the most engagement – and thus greater prominence – and more upvotes.

And this is before we even get to the issue of the Negativity Bias – an inherent psychological tendency to give negative experiences, emotions and memories more weight and credence than positive ones – and a propensity to masochistic epistemology: “truth hurts, so if it hurts, it must be true”.

Now with all this in mind, let’s drag this back around to your question: how do you stop letting the negativity you see on social media drag your confidence down into the gutter? Well, we’ve already touched on the first step: quit doomscrolling Reddit and TikTok and YouTube, and if you do visit, stop giving obvious rage bait credence.

In fact, I’m tempted to leave it there, because part of why you keep having this problem is that reading those threads and posts just serves to reinforce those beliefs. The longer you spend away from them and actually interacting with people in person, the more those feelings are going to fade and the more you’ll see that people are actually far more diverse and varied and capable of nuance than online forums and subreddits give credit for.

But you also have to be willing to take a deep breath when you have that knee-jerk emotional response to a thread and take a moment to actually think, not just react. You want to ask yourself: “Does this community actually represent people like me, or does it make assumptions of everyone who comes here? Do these replies actually make sense, or does they seem more like someone’s doomer belief? Are they actually trying to help or are they just complaining? Would I trust this stranger’s opinion – a person who I didn’t know existed before just now – on any other topic that’s important to me?”

If you do insist on reading through threads that you already know are just going to upset you, pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. Are you actually taking in contrary opinions, or are you focusing entirely on the ones that make you feel bad? Are any of the threads actually helpful, or are they just a bunch of people trading complaints back and forth and amplifying the worst aspects? Those are the times when you should start to recognize that what you’re perceiving isn’t reality or consensus, it’s volume and repetition – just saying things over and over again until it starts sounding true. But if you pay attention – really paying attention – I think you’ll be surprised to see how often what you’re actually seeing are the same people just amplifying the same points over and over again.

To be sure: just being aware of all of this isn’t going to render you immune to confirmation bias or change how you feel. But it should remind you that what you’re seeing is just noise, not signal, and you don’t need to take it on board or even take it all that seriously. It will also remind you that what people say online and how people behave in reality don’t always line up – especially when it comes to people making grandiose declarations about what other people think based on their own feelings.

And speaking of being back in the real world: there will always be people who aren’t interested in dating or sleeping with older virgins. There will also be people who aren’t interested in sleeping with redheads or people with glasses or other arbitrary qualities. That doesn’t have anything to do with your worth as a person; that’s their issue, not yours. Especially since being a virgin – or not – is inherently neutral. It means literally nothing except whether you’ve had a particular experience. It says exactly as much about your worth as a person as whether you played Little League baseball, built robots or watched a particular TV show. Which is to say: sweet f--k-all.

Here is a truth: while I don’t think somebody’s first time needs to be special or meaningful, I do think that it should be worth it. And that means sleeping with someone who’s worth sleeping with. You want a partner who’s going to be considerate and giving, who’s going to be as interested in your having a good time as their own. If someone thinks your being a virgin at your age is a red flag or a detriment in some way, shape or form, all they’ve told you is that they aren’t worth your time. Those people aren’t proof that you’re somehow less desirable for completely arbitrary and meaningless reasons. They’re just a bullet that you’ve dodged, and you’re free to disregard them going forward.

Don’t take on their bulls--t beliefs. You deserve better than that.

Good luck.  

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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com